It was a quiet week in Springfield as the Illinois Senate was the only chamber in session. Heres what took place: Virtual charter school moratorium bill assigned to substantive committee On Wednesday, the Senate Assignments Committee referred House Bill 494 to the Senate Education Committee, where it is scheduled to be heard next Tuesday, April...
Making sure we identify poor teachers and have them exit the teaching profession should be of the utmost importance. This is because teachers, by far, have the single biggest impact on student success.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about how Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, introduced a bill that would give tax credits to corporations if they donate to nonprofit organizations that provide scholarships to students in low-income families for private school tuition. Now, state Rep. Michael Connelly, R-Wheaton, has introduced a parallel bill in the Illinois General Assembly....
For more than a decade, Illinois’ Medicaid program has failed to meet the needs of the state’s most vulnerable residents. Access to high-quality care has deteriorated, even as record amounts of taxpayer dollars are spent on the ballooning program. Over the years, eligibility standards have loosened to increasingly include families earning ever-higher incomes. Today, only...
Though most of the attention Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, has received since he delivered the Republican response to the president’s State of the Union speech has been about his bad timing when taking a drink of water, many of the ideas he presented should have piqued viewers’ interest. This excerpt was music to my ears: “We need...
Diane Cohen General Counsel Liberty Justice Center In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in NFIB v. Sebelius last June, and with the prospects for repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act dashed by the 2012 elections, key states – including Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia...
As teachers’ strikes continue to spread across Illinois, union officials are pushing back against criticisms that they are not doing enough to raise student achievement. One of the most common excuses they use to explain the lack of results – apart from claiming that low-income populations have too many issues to overcome, something the Institute showed is...
Illinois students could soon benefit from scholarship money to help them find a tutor, attend ACT or SAT prep sessions, pay tuition, get special education services or assist with other academic needs. That will happen in Illinois only if Gov. J.B. Pritzker lets the state’s schoolchildren benefit from the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit program, established...